Mobile radio communications is currently growing at such a rate that there is a desire to increase the number of users served simultaneously in a given radio communications network. The approach generally adopted for this is to optimize the use of the spectrum of the available transmission and reception frequencies.
In a radio communications network of the cellular type, it is, in particular, possible to allow a plurality of mobiles to communicate simultaneously by allocating them the same frequency in the same cell of the network: this is the object of the technique referred to as SDMA (Space Division Multiple Access).
In this case, use is generally made of an antenna whose radiation diagram has at least one lobe. The antenna creates energy minima in reception and transmission to the mobiles, other than the useful mobile, which share the same frequency with it and constitute interference sources for this useful mobile.
Signal processing methods, applied to multi-element antennas, are known which make it possible to improve the reception by acting on the up link.
However, the steps and the parameters involved in the known methods generally depend on the nature of the propagation channels observed on the various elements of the antenna. However, these channels are themselves, in particular, dependent on the carrier frequency. When the down link uses a frequency different from that of the up link, the weightings calculated and applied to the signals received by the various elements for the up link cannot generally be reused for the down link.
In an article entitled "Adaptive transmitting antenna methods for multipath environments", Globecom'94, pages 425-429, D. GERLACH and A. PAULRAJ describe a method for spatial filtering in transmission, applied to a multi-element antenna. This method has a number of limitations and drawbacks.
Firstly, it assumes that there is no intersymbol interference, which is not necessarily the case in practice.
Furthermore, in order to have information on the nature of the propagation channels of the down link, this prior method requires feedback from the mobile in question, that is to say the base station periodically sends test signals to the mobile, which measures them and sends the result of the measurement back to the base station. The presence of a delay between the feedback and the retransmission by the base station imposes some degree of time stability on the quantities which are measured. The number of measurements to be sent as feedback increases if the nature of the propagation channels changes rapidly. Thus, the amount of feedback which is needed may be extremely high. Even if attempts are made to reduce it, this amount of feedback necessarily limits the rate of useful information sent.